Symposium on the 19th Century Press, the Civil War, and Free Expression

November 7-9, 2013

Sarah Adler, American University, “Changing Perceptions of Russians in the American Press, 1789-1865”

This article examines the perceptions of Russians within American newspaper articles
spanning the late eighteenth to mid-nineteenth centuries. From 1789 to 1865, newspapers
acted as one of the only sources of information for literate Americans wanting to
learn about Russia and its people. However, these articles often presented readers
with contradictory ideas concerning Russians, their culture, and their government.
The ways that the American press treated the topic of the Russian people in this period
can be classified into three main categories: negative, positive-exotic, and positive.
While negative portrayals continued throughout the whole period—including the American
Civil War—the press switched seamlessly between positive-exotic and positive descriptions
depending upon international affairs and the diplomatic needs of the United States.
Using articles from newspapers around the country, I identify the shifts in how the
press presented Russians to American readers throughout various international incidents,
noting especially the striking change during the Civil War, when perceptions became
more positive than ever. Through my findings, I explain how the nineteenth century
American press played a large role in establishing and influencing attitudes towards
Russians as either “others” or friends depending on the perceived needs of the nation
at each moment.

Gregory A. Borchard, University of Nevada, Las Vegas, “Photography and the President:
Abraham Lincoln through the Historiographic Lens”

While biographers have noted that Abraham Lincoln was the first president to use photography
to present a favorable public image of his administration, particular photos—both
those widely circulated during Lincoln’s presidency and those discovered since—reveal
a compelling story of his life, one that neither newspapers nor the president alone
could provide. This presentation focuses on the role photography played in developing
Lincoln's legacy, describing our subsequently amorphous understandings of events that
were depicted in a sample of photos by Mathew Brady and Alexander Garner. As a case
study in the complexities of interpreting specific events in Lincoln's life, this
presentation also introduces topics on the panel "The Civil War and Free Expression:
Press and Presidential Problems of the Civil War Era." It provides a visual demonstration
of the general historiographic challenges faced by nineteenth century press historians.

With the 21st century’s presidential campaigns obsessed with fund-raising, popularity polls and
media appeal, Franklin Pierce and James Buchanan would probably never be nominated
to the presidency today, much less win the Oval Office. Their campaigns and administrations
suffered from modest money, low popularity, and poor press relations. Presidential
historians rank these two undistinguished one-termers at the bottom of “greatness”
rankings.

In the growing mid-19th Century newspaper industry, waning partisan newspapers still battled, while rising
independent newspapers and their editors, particularly from New York City, gained
influence. The relationships of Pierce and Buchanan with independent newspapers and
party organs as candidates, and later as presidents, significantly impacted the successes
and failures of their one-term administrations.

That impact can be assessed by studying the press relations of Pierce and Buchanan
with influential editors of selected independent newspapers, national newspapers and
party organs. Those relationships resulted in a variety of perspectives in news columns
and editorials, which reported and analyzed the performance of their respective administrations.

During his New Hampshire political career, Pierce learned the value of fostering positive
relationships with state newspaper editors. The Democratic “dark horse” candidate
survived character assassinations during his 1852 presidential campaign concerning
his Mexican War record and being anti-Catholic. Those attacks did not spoil his
landside electoral win over another war hero, the Whig nominee General Winfield Scott.

Pierce’s ineffectual public relations began before the election and continued into
his presidency. With Pierce being secretive in his decisions and sensitive to press
criticism, his presidential secretary, Sidney Webster, filtered only positive coverage
to his boss. Meanwhile, not only did the opposition’s newspapers and independent
press belittle Pierce, but the Democratic newspapers also grew opposed to a second
term.

Once Pierce’s party deserted him, Buchanan, the American minister to Great Britain
and former Secretary of State, won the Democratic nod and defeated the Republican’s
first presidential nominee John C. Frémont in 1856.

Despite Buchanan’s broader political experience, the critical issues that overwhelmed
his administration also frustrated his press relations. Both independent and party
newspapers criticized this presidency, even with his efforts to build personal relationships
with prominent editors, who were increasingly impacting public opinion. By the time
he left office, Buchanan’s press relations were nonexistent, even with editors who
once supported him.

Among the editors considered in this study are James Gordon Bennett (New York Herald), Henry Raymond (New York Times), William Cullen Bryant (New York Evening Post) and Horace Greeley (New York Tribune).

David W. Bulla, Zayed University, “1863 and the Seasons of Press Suppression in the
North”

The spring and summer of 1863 were turning points for press suppression in the North
during the Civil War. Four key events occurred: 1) Brigadier General Milo Hascall’s
suppressed Indiana newspapers; 2) Major General Ambrose Burnside suppressed the Chicago Times; 3) resolutions were made by editors at a professional conference in New York; and
4) Major General John Schofield tried to shutter the Missouri press. This presentation
addresses how these events led to a gradual diminishment of restraints on the press
in the North. It provides commentary on how these four events fit into Frederick S.
Siebert’s hypothesis about official censorship in wartime — that is, how those in
power try to contract the freedoms of others.

For the administration of President Abraham Lincoln, never had prospects of

suppressing the rebellion and restoring the Union seemed as grim as in the winter
of 1863. Democratic gains at the polls the previous fall, the slaughter of the Army
of the Potomac at Fredericksburg in December, and its ignominious “Mud March” in January
combined to render Lincoln’s re-election and aggressive prosecution of the war highly
problematic.

One keen political observer sensed opportunity for a bold stroke. August Belmont,
head of the Democratic National Committee, believed the moment to bid for control
of Northern public opinion was at hand and organized a meeting of like-minded party
conservatives in New York City from which sprang The Society for the Diffusion of
Political Knowledge; an organization dedicated to distribution of ideological tracts
in pamphlet form to influence opinion in favor of the party’s political agenda. The
founding of the society raised the curtain on an intense, twenty-month struggle for
dominance of discourse and discussion. Driven by members of the Northern intelligentsia,
the battle over the minds and hearts of civilians and soldiers alike eventually launched
not just the brainchild of Belmont, but no fewer than three other opposing organizations.

Equally committed to political action, but focused instead upon the re-election of
Lincoln and prosecution of the Union war effort, these loyal publication societies
produced a body of work deserving of renewed contemporary study not just because of
their pioneering application of propaganda to the influence of public opinion within
the country’s borders in time of crisis, but also for their uniquely American strategies
and tactics often lost in surveys of the propaganda organizations created by the United
States government to significant effect in

World War I and World War II.

Moreover, the dramatic times in which these organizations operated, the innovations
visited upon the press of the day to disseminate their propaganda content, and the
impact upon the outcome of the presidential election of 1864 all suggest that any
meaningful review of Civil War propaganda should feature a more robust examination
of these temporary associations and the individuals who brought them to life. While
historians join in celebrating the role of the citizen soldier in securing military
victory for the Union, journalism scholars would do as well to recall the contributions
of those citizen propagandists who risked much to steer public opinion in support of their ideological and political
aims.

Crompton Burton, Marietta College, “‘Little Hickory,’ A Roorback, and ‘Father’ Ritchie:
The Press and the Presidency of James Knox Polk”

Scholarly surveys of the nineteenth century press and its relationship to the presidency
of the United States often rely upon well-worn case studies of contentious political
campaigns and character studies of the partisan editors whose biting commentary helped
shape the eventual outcome of the elections. Bitter contests between Thomas Jefferson
and John Adams in 1800 and John Quincy Adams and Andrew Jackson in 1828 justifiably
highlight such reviews and in combination with the requisite treatment of the struggles
of Abraham Lincoln and his administration to balance censorship and freedom of the
press during the American Civil War round out contemporary narratives on the topic.

In the presence of founding fathers and the young republic’s defining crisis, the
benefit of extending inquiry to less familiar chief executives such as James Knox
Polk and their interactions with the newspapers of their day might seem destined to
yield results of little consequence. In fact, the opposite is true and often overlooked,
for instance, is the realization that more than a decade before Lincoln and his Cabinet were confronted and often confounded by an industry significantly
transformed through the technology of the telegraph and revolutionary reportage of
war correspondents, Polk encountered similar challenges without benefit of past practice
to guide his reaction and response.

Forced to conduct a closely scrutinized war effort on foreign soil with diplomatic
intrigue aplenty on multiple fronts, Polk was also charged with maintaining his party’s
voice with the electorate through management of the often inept Democratic organ located
within arm’s length in the nation’s capital. And, lest anyone think Polk insulated
from sensational mistreatment at the hands of his Whig opponents in his only presidential
campaign of 1844, his experience included an encounter that became so vicious and,
ultimately, proved so groundless, it remains the working definition of slanderous
storytelling designed to gain political advantage.

In sum, Polk emerges as a chief executive well worth placing in any conversation about
the nineteenth century press and its uniquely American relationship with the highest
office in the land. Whether visiting his dark horse candidacy that so captured the
public imagination and that of his ideological competitors or tracking his media strategy
in pursuit of a controversial policy of Manifest Destiny, the heir to Jackson’s political
legacy takes a legitimate place among the likes of Adams, Jefferson, Jackson, and
Lincoln when authoring narratives of the new nation’s first hundred years of papers,
presidents and partisanship.

Joseph J. Cook, American Military University, “Thunders of Divine Wrath: Newspaper
Reaction to the Death of General Canby”

President Ulysses S. Grant pushed ahead a policy of peace in regard to Indian affairs.
Prominent men like Grant’s old friend, General William Tecumseh Sherman, were held
in check by the president’s Peace Policy – forced to work for the preservation of
tranquility. The lieutenant general of the army, Philip Sheridan, famously said, “The
only good Indian is a dead Indian,” but he too was obliged to obey the wishes of his
former commanding general and now commander-in-chief. Yet when outcry for action becomes
relentless and extreme, and touches the whole population, a president is forced to
respond. Grant and his policy were forced onto the defensive when General Edward R.S.
Canby was murdered by Modoc Indians – the only United States general officer killed
in wars against Native Americans. From New York to Oregon, and among Canby’s former
enemies in the South, newspapers assaulted the Peace Policy and demanded immediate
extermination of the Modoc – or of all Native Americans. Republican and Democratic
newspapers united in a thunderous chorus. President Grant, though, recognizing the
need for a response that was proportionate and measured, weathered the storm of press
reaction and held on to his conviction in his overall strategy on the issue. He was
guided by his own belief in the rightness of the Peace Policy and by the Lieber Code
he had operated under as general-in-chief. In a controversial and difficult administration,
this was an event in which Grant could take some pride for showing presidential wisdom
and fortitude in the face of outrageous media pressure.

Steven Cox, University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, “Acorns, Swords, and Shamrocks:
Publishers’ Cover Design on Civil War Books, 1862-1900”

Before the American Civil War had ended, American publishers began publishing books
about the war, including regimental histories, battle accounts, personal narratives,
and biographies of officers and soldiers. In America, as well as Great Britain and
the rest of Europe, books had been issued in cloth covers starting in the 1830s.
Publishers were realizing that people were cherishing their books, displaying them
on their tables and shelves, and presenting them to their loved ones and friends as
gifts and keepsakes. Publishers experimented with a variety of cloth colors, cloth
grains, and also employed engravers to cut stamps in which to gold-stamp designs and
images into the covers, to make them as attractive as possible. When books about
the Civil War began appearing publishers used a variety of images to decorate the
books: Patriotic images, such as flags and medals; soldiers and statues; acorns;
harps and shamrocks (for Irish regiments); and weapons such as swords, rifles and
cannons. Later in the 19th century, battle and camp scenes began appearing on book covers in a more graphic
illustrated style.

This presentation, which will be a visual display using Powerpoint, will show the
images and trends used by publishers as they issued books on the Civil War from 1862-1900,
and will include additional book covers not shown in this paper.

Mary Cronin, New Mexico State University, “Davis v. Massachusetts: Public Forums, Expressive Conduct and Regulated Liberty in the Nineteenth Century”

The Rev. William F. Davis challenged the constitutionality of a Boston ordinance that
prohibited preaching and oration in that city’s parks before the U. S. Supreme Court
in 1897. Two previous appeals the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court (in 1886 and
1894) and the subsequent the U. S. Supreme Court challenge often are cited by legal
scholars as the foundations for modern public forum analysis. This research argues
the Davis case should not be considered in this fashion. Instead, the ruling should be thought
of as the case that established the constitutional status of public speaking during
the nineteenth-century. Unlike modern interpretations of public forum analysis, which
hold that speech and assembly on public property are civil liberties, the Davis ruling did not support giving citizens a right of access to public property for expressive
purposes. Furthermore, neither the Massachusetts Court, nor the U. S. Supreme Court
decided Davis on First Amendment grounds. Instead, both courts ignored Davis’s arguments that his
civil liberties had been curtailed and, instead, ruled narrowly, using property law
analysis.

Sandra Davidson, University of Missouri, “An Ugly History: Privileges of Citizenship and the Fourteenth Amendment in the Civil
War Era”

Shortly before and after the Civil War, the U.S. Supreme Court decided a trilogy of
cases, Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857), Bradwell v. Illinois (1873), and Minor v. Happersett (1875), that ruled against the plaintiffs’ pleas for rights and dignity and also
ultimately denied them important aspects of freedom of expression. The high Court
ruled against an African-American, Dred Scott; he was not a citizen and thus had no
freedom to express his case in court. The Court also ruled against a woman, Myra
Bradwell, who wanted to practice law. She, too, was denied freedom of expression
in the form of advocacy for others in a court of law. And the Court ruled against
another woman, Virginia Minor, who wanted to vote. She was denied that ultimate freedom
of expression in a democracy.

In the Supreme Court’s constricted view of citizenship applied in Dred Scott’s case
in 1857, people of color were not deemed citizens. After the passage of the Fourteenth
Amendment in 1868, the Supreme Court expanded its view of citizenship. But that amendment
was not sufficient in the Court’s eyes to give females the right to practice law or
to vote. These three rulings (Scott, Bradwell, and Minor) were not inevitable, based on the Court’s 1803 decision in Marbury v. Madison. There the Court declared its power of judicial review. “A law repugnant to the
Constitution is void,” the Court said, claiming the power to declare if a law was
“repugnant....” But the Court failed to exercise this power to aid Scott, Bradwell,
or Minor, thus restricting their freedom of expression.

Nancy Dupont, University of Mississippi, “This Causeless War: The Transformation of New Orleans Newspapers During Union Occupation”

When New Orleans fell to the Union in 1862, there was a vibrant newspaper market filled
with editors supporting both the Confederate and Union causes as well as one, the
largest newspaper, which remained neutral during secession and the first year of the
war. But Union General Benjamin Butler put a stop to debate by suppressing some papers,
jailing some editors, and allowing his troops to take over one paper altogether.
Butler’s successor, General Nathanial Banks, was somewhat easier on the newspapers,
but he did not hesitate to suppress some he believed to be disloyal to the Union.
Both generals allowed the newspapers to editorialize in favor of slavery with writing
that was racist and defiant.

At the time, New Orleans had the largest population of Free People of Color in the
United States; many were educated and wealthy. Under Union occupation, they saw their
chance to demand rights for all Black citizens, be they slave or free. In October
1862, they began the first African-American newspaper in the South, and when it folded,
they started another newspaper, which became the first African American daily in the
United States. Though the Union army ignored them, they felt they were somewhat empowered
to finally demand rights denied them for so many years.

On October 25, 1858, in Rochester, New York, William H. Seward told his audience,
“It is an irrepressible conflict between opposing and enduring forces, and it means
that the United States must and will, sooner or later, become either entirely a slaveholding
nation, or entirely a free-labor nation.” Similar to Abraham Lincoln’s “House Divided”
speech given months before, Seward’s rhetoric identified the inevitable in the slavery
battle. Unlike the less widely known Lincoln, Seward was a powerful New York senator
whose words resonated in minds North and South well into Lincoln’s presidency. When
John Brown led his posse into Harper’s Ferry in 1859, the Richmond Enquirer’s editor quickly reminded readers of Seward’s warning: “The irrepressible conflict
was initiated at Harper’s Ferry, and though there, for the time suppressed,” continuing,
“yet no man is able to say when or where it will begin again or where it will end.”
In New York City, James Gordon Bennett called Seward a “demagogue” for making the
speech and stirring up trouble. This presentation explains press reaction to the “Irrepressible
Conflict” speech, especially in the South, where many editors clamored for Seward’s
arrest after the Harper’s Ferry raid, blaming him for inciting abolitionists such
as Brown.

This panel presentation provides insight into efforts to integrate the original works—primary
source news articles and investigative reports including Southern Horrors, A Red Record and Mob Rule In New Orleans—of often overlooked journalist Ida B. Wells into regular journalism curriculum, as
well as to create a free-standing, short-term elective course on her. Until fairly
recently, this courageous pioneer willing to risk her life to speak truth to power
was a mere footnote in history. New scholarship indicates she was in the forefront
of early U.S. movements for civil rights, women’s suffrage and Progressivism but was
often marginalized and misunderstood by black male leaders and white women reformers.
One author argues Wells’ fight against lynching (a terrorism “tool used to regulate
behavior and the manner in which public opinion is shaped and lived out in the private
sector”) is a viable option to address modern forms of oppression.

Joe Hayden, University of Memphis, “‘Ruling the Roost’: The Occupied Press in Civil
War Chattanooga”

A conventional historiographical theme of Civil War journalism is the story of Confederate
newspapermen on the run. Less well-known are the itinerant Union editors who moved
about for much the same reason—because they were bribed, enticed, scared, or threatened
into relocating. James R. Hood was one such journalist. Appointed postmaster by Governor
Andrew Johnson once federal troops retook east Tennessee, he began publishing the
Chattanooga Daily Gazette in 1864, and for the next two years waved the flag for Union and Lincoln. He advocated
the immediate emancipation of slaves, too, although he didn’t immediately take up
the cause until more influential politicians began urging it. Hood resisted encroachments
on press freedom, on his own in particular, and protested mail inspections of citizens
he thought sufficiently loyal. His position in a city occupied by federal troops turned
out to be a quasi-military one, and he seemed to view it that way. For Hood, as perhaps
for many other editors during the Civil War, politics trumped even journalism.

Northern city newspapers did not write directly about the rape inherent in Southern
slavery. But they did write extensively, and more and more over time, about the mixed
race families and the flight of African women with their white children from a slavery
of rape and concubinage. This paper explores the academic literature on slavery and
rape in the antebellum U.S., before taking a closer look at three key contexts for
the North’s emerging 1850s coverage of interracial rape in slavery. Those contexts
are the racial rape coverage that abounded in post-1830s abolitionist and free black
media, the encouragement of race/rape by the Southern press as a money-making strategy,
and finally, the word-picture descriptive prose common to the antebellum press. This
study then shows, with numerous examples, how reporters used their detailed prose
descriptions to capture color variation that revealed the mixed blood of self-emancipated
African-Americans, especially after the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 created a wave
of escape-capture-trial scenarios in the Northern states.

James B. Jones, Tennessee Historical Commission/State Historic Preservation Office,
“Heroes and Villians: The Stereotypical Imagery of Loyalty and Secession Set in Civil
War East Tennessee; Three Examples from Popular Fiction, 1862-1864”

Literary analysis of popular fiction provides a convincing estimation of social anxieties
and interaction that are challenging to obtain in any other manner. When examined
in the light of the Civil War, Federal heroes and villains (loyal unionists and secessionist
rebels) fall into stereotypes often taken for granted in studies of the Civil War.
Ironic tragedy, depictions of moral courage, social cowardice, gender and racial roles
are represented in three fictional accounts of life in war-time East Tennessee: the
short stories “The Blacksmith of Tennessee;” “Whipping the Wrong Woman;” and the novelette
Miss Martha Brownlow: or the Heroine of Tennessee. It cannot be surprising that all three examples portray Confederates as villains
and Unionists as heroes and African Americans as loyal slaves who earn their freedom
as the result of assisting their benevolent Unionist masters. These depictions deserve
consideration as they expose standpoints on masculinity, politics, slavery, manhood,
honor, women and race in Tennessee as viewed through the genre medium of popular Civil
War fiction.

Wells is remembered for her criticism of Southern race relations. Her potent words,
bold deeds, and their consequences revealed, in turn, how American journalism and
the Southern press were deeply implicated in this brutal “racial regime,” one in which
coercive relations were reinforced by journalism’s narratives. Another late 19th-century critic who sought to expose conditions in the South was African-American
novelist Charles Chesnutt. His famous 1901 novel, Marrow of Tradition, fictionalized the 1898 Wilmington, N.C., race riot. Central to the actual riot,
as well as Chesnutt’s novel, were the actions of the News and Observer under editor Josephus Daniels. Chesnutt diagnosed the distorted journalism of the
News and Observer and how it fit into a broader circuit of publicity and racism that ensured the North
would turn a deaf ear to the entreaties of its Black citizens for equal rights. This
panel presentation investigates Chesnutt’s depiction of the press’s role in the 1898
riot, as well as his broader critical perspective on the press’s role of journalism
in sustaining racial hegemony. Chesnutt’s perspective is compared to the insights
offered by Wells’ writings and her experience in trying to expose and change Southern
conditions and the terror of lynching.

Lucy Webb Hayes, wife of 19th U.S. President Rutherford B. Hayes, embodied the archetypes
of the “caregiver” and the “warrior” both in public and private places. Five of her
eight children lived to adulthood; however, perhaps, the most surprising expression
of these roles occurred in Yankee camps and hospitals. The gender restrictions of
her time frustrated Hayes. This abolitionist lamented not being allowed to play a
meaningful role in the northern army. In the tumultuous decades following the Civil
War, she devoted her energies to helping others through church and Ohio charities.
When she died, eulogists predicted that her good deeds and courageous battle against
poverty would echo throughout the ages.

Elliot King, Loyola University, “A Step on the Road to the 14th Amendment: Andrew Johnson’s Veto of the Freedmen’s Bureau Reauthorization and the
Civil Rights Bills of 1866”

When Andrew Johnson first assumed the presidency in 1865, the Radical Republicans
in Congress were hopeful he would be a strong proponent of their approach to the reconstruction
of the South and the terms on which southern states would re-enter the Union. During
the war, Johnson had advocated harsh punishment of Southern “traitors,” and in a speech
in 1864 in Nashville, he had declared to a crowd of ex-slaves that he would be their
Moses and lead them to freedom. Not without controversies during the first year of
his administration, Johnson seemed to navigate the political currents coursing through
Washington with wide differences splitting Republicans and Democrats in their approaches
to reconstruction, citizenship, and voting rights for the freed slaves. Johnson’s
initially deft management ended when he vetoed both the reauthorization of the Freedmen’s
Bureau (established to promote the welfare of freed Blacks) and the Civil Rights Act,
which gave all people born in the United States (except Native Americans) new legal
rights and gave the federal government enforcement authority. Those vetoes infuriated
the North and the Radical Republicans and proved to be a stepping-stone in the process
that would ultimately lead to the passage of the 14th Amendment. Using a new approach in media studies called sociolinguistics, this presentation
examines the language used in the public discourse sparked by the veto to identify
the ideas that would be used to support and oppose the 14th Amendment.

On the night of August 14, 1880, a shotgun blast ended the life of former Confederate
general Bryan Grimes. Grimes’s death and the ensuing trial of his accused killer
became a fixture of North Carolina’s political sphere. State and national newspaper
coverage played a major role in both the trial’s outcome and the ways that North Carolinians
remembered Grimes and his death.

The Grimes murder occurred at a time of significant change, not only for North Carolina,
but for the state’s newspapers as well. Prior to the Civil War, the state’s dynamic
two-party system spawned a vibrant newspaper culture. By 1880, as the white Democratic
machine grew to dominate the state’s politics, the party also strove to control the
state’s newspapers.

Coverage of the Grimes murder played a significant part in the Democratic campaign
for press supremacy. The party’s new organ, the Raleigh News & Observer, made Grimes’s death and the search for his murderer a cause célèbre for white North
Carolinians. When suspicion, and criminal charges, fell on a young white Republican,
the paper used the opportunity to target the state’s biracial Republican Party.

In addition to solidifying Democratic control of the press, the Grimes murder also
played a major role in resituating the public’s memory of Grimes. Before his death,
Grimes was a lowly regarded minor political figure in eastern North Carolina. However,
by manipulating newspaper coverage, Grimes’s family and friends turned the former
general into North Carolina’s preeminent Lost Cause hero.

My paper, “‘He Wrote Me Dead’: Southern Newspapers, Violence & the Politics of Memory,”
examines in greater detail this lost episode in the rise of the modern press in North
Carolina. Using the trial coverage as a case study, my work illustrates the links
between newspapers, political violence, and the beginnings of the Lost Cause.

Joseph Marren, Buffalo State College, “In God We Trust: A Historiography of American
Civil Religion in the 19th Century Presidency and How the Press Played Its Role”

In some regards, the chief executive of the land is the high priest of the American
sense of how justice is mediated and how liberty is defined. It is the only national
office up for consideration every four years and, although electors elect the president
and not the people, the person who wins the office is the international face and voice
of the cherished beliefs of the American people.

This study will look at how the American presidency of the 19th century, through portrayals in the media, fulfilled – or didn’t – that religio-political
mindset. Therefore, it is not a research study, per se, but a look at various current
scholarly interpretations of presidential personalities and intersections with the
operative, dominant Christian beliefs that shape a sense of power and determine the
course of domestic and foreign policy.

The role of the press is key because it informs people of the daily happenings and
thereby reasserts a sense of communal civil religion. And yet, reporters do not report
about religion, but about society. It is that society and its core beliefs that make
up the civil religion. And it is the president who speaks for us all in times that
range from good to bad and shades in-between.

Why the 19th century? Because it was the era of Manifest Destiny when a country saw itself as
something more than a series of former British colonies clinging to the Atlantic seaboard,
when it expanded and grew and believed, perhaps hubristically, that it set the agenda
for a helisphere. It was the time when notions of freedom were tested and almost torn
apart and the notion of what this country is went from “these United States are” to
“this United States is.”

So, then, what presidents, certainly Abraham Lincoln. Both Lincoln and CSA President
Jeff Davis and a host of others called upon God to help their side during the Civil
War. Contrast that with someone like Grover Cleveland who was vilified in many pulpits
during the 1884 election and this study looks at the role religion was used and/or
abused in press coverage vis-à-vis the presidency. Therefore this isn’t so much about
presidents but the presidency, though it looks at some specific presidents and some
others in-between Lincoln and Cleveland.

James E. Mueller, University of North Texas, “Swinging and Missing: Andrew Johnson and the Press”

Andrew Johnson’s relationship with the press has largely been defined by the coverage
of his disastrous “Swing Around the Circle” — a speaking tour Johnson used to try
to persuade people to vote for his favored candidates during the 1866 midterm election.
Although the tour started well with Johnson addressing cheering crowds, it quickly
deteriorated as he engaged hecklers in raucous debate, ruining his image with many
of the reporters who covered his trip. In fact, his inflammatory remarks were considered
so undignified that Congress used his speeches as the basis of one of the impeachment
charges against him in 1868. Nevertheless, Johnson was a savvy politician who granted
frequent interviews and invested in a newspaper in his home state to further his career.
James Pollard wrote in his book on the presidents and the press that Johnson was significant
because of his use of interviews to try to reach the public through the press. This
panel presentation will discuss the pros and cons of Johnson’s press relations, seeking
a balanced interpretation of his record.

Abby Mullen, Northeastern University, “When the Pen Gives Way to the Sword: Editorial Violence in the Nineteenth Century”

Violence was a common threat for newspapermen in the nineteenth century. Political
and social controversy often boiled over into vandalism and assaults of newspaper
editors. But sometimes editors turned the tables and took violent action themselves.
Because of the close proximity of many rival newspapers to each other, political controversy
could easily become heated. Since the newspapers were so close together, it was relatively
easy for editors to engage in physical confrontations. From general rabble-rousing
to outright murder, editors took freedom of expression to a physical level.

Since violence was part of many editors’ careers, we have to ask: Why were violence
and newspapers linked? This paper offers three possible catalysts for violent behavior.
First, newspapers were driven by politics. Politics has always been a touchstone for
violent behavior, and newspapers were political almost by definition. Editors could
get much-coveted appointments and other benefits from their political parties, or
their papers could be crushed under the weight of the opposing party. In either case,
political ambition often led to violence. Second, the general stresses of running
a newspaper could cause an editor to become violent. It took a very strong-willed
person to overcome the adversity of being a newspaper editor. Sometimes the fight
just to get the papers to press every week caused conflict in the newspaper community.
And third, editors’ sense of honor and respectability caused them to take violent
action when affronted. In the nineteenth century, an affront to one’s honor almost
always required a physical response, and editors were especially sensitive about their
honor. Though not every editor had to deal with all three of these issues, and even
some who did never erupted into violence, these reasons provide a partial explanation
for why newspaper editing in the nineteenth century was not for the faint of heart.

Scott Peterson, Wright State University, and Jennifer Moore, University of Maine,
“Picturing Sports: Finding the ‘Actual’ in Nineteenth Century Illustrated Sporting
News”

This is a preliminary study of sporting news in selected issues of Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper from 1885 to 1895. Asking how the illustrated press portrayed sports and sporting
events in the last decades of the nineteenth century, the authors analyzed selected
images to help determine how the ethos of realism was employed in pictorial representations
of sports. During this period in journalism history, visual journalism was in transition.
Photographic reproduction in newspapers was still being developed and perfected, so
illustrating pictorial news content was still widely practiced. Using Thomas Connery’s
“paradigm of actuality” thesis as a theoretical framework, the researchers developed
an “actuality” scale to help identify how realism was used to report on both amateur
and professional sports in illustrated news reporting. As technology progressed to
allow for photographs to become more frequent in newspapers, did the illustrations
become more realistic? In this preliminary study, the authors attempt to reveal how
pictorial news about sports changed over time, noting the technical, social and economic
factors that may have contributed to changes in pictorial sports reporting.

Jodi L. Rightler-McDaniels, University of Tennessee, A.B.D., “‘Would Be Negro Leader’
or ‘Pioneer Crusader?’: Anniversary Coverage of Ida B. Wells-Barnett in The New York Times and The Chicago Defender; 1909-2013”

Black feminist thought argues that sexism and racism are inextricably linked. The
oppression of Black women is part of a larger societal system that works to protect
elitists. As a Black woman who tirelessly fought for the equal treatment of Blacks
and women, Ida B. Wells-Barnett embodied this unique intersection of race and gender
during a key civil rights period in the United States. This panel presentation explores
how public memory of Wells-Barnett was constructed in The New York Times and The Chicago Defender between 1909-2013. One central aim of this discussion is to provide insight into
the operation of politics of memory with regard to race and gender relations as manifested
in the mainstream press and the Black press.

Paul Ringel, High Point University, “This Is Not Your Place: Children, Citizenship, and the Civil War in the Youth’s Companion”

When the Civil War began, the Youth’s Companion was a magazine struggling to find its niche in the marketplace of children’s publishing.
Daniel Sharp Ford, its ambitious young editor, had tried to develop a more directly
commercial relationship with his young readers than any previous American children’s
magazine, but had encountered resistance from his audience. The war initially caused
him to retract from his commercialization efforts, but as the conflict persisted its
pervasive reach into children’s lives led to a widespread reconsideration of their
roles as citizens of the Union.

Ford’s contribution to this debate was a claim that children should remain only minimally
involved in the great collective endeavor that was the northern war effort; instead,
the best way that they could contribute to the Union was to remain at home and carefully
regulate their individual behavior to ensure that they were conducting themselves
according to Christian values. This position placed him at odds with the cultural
establishment, which encouraged children to imagine themselves as part of the communal
effort and to participate in that effort according to their capabilities. Yet as the
war drew children out of their private, protected spheres and more into public life,
it exposed them to the economic as well as the political realms of citizenship. This
change, as exemplified by the exposure of young readers to new products such as dime
novels, broke down many of the barriers that had stymied Ford’s antebellum efforts
to develop a commercial relationship with his juvenile audience. In fact, Ford’s link
of commerce to individual moral development, which largely had failed during the antebellum
era, proved astonishingly popular during the postwar era, when the success of the
Companion revealed a lasting legacy of the war for American children: their arrival as economic,
rather than political, citizens of the United States.

Amber Roessner, University of Tennessee, Knoxville, “‘Modern Joan of Arc’: Ida B.
Wells-Barnett’s Forgotten Role in the Women’s Rights Movement”

Professor Roessner has written about the ways in which nineteenth-century female journalists
such as Jane Cunningham Croly, Sarah Hale, and Ida B. Wells-Barnett addressed women’s
rights issues. As the chair of the University of Tennessee’s School of Journalism
& Electronic Media’s Ida B. Wells-Barnett Initiative, she will contribute to the panel
discussion by providing insight into Wells-Barnett’s work and legacy as a women’s
rights advocate. In particular, she will share insights from the recent research conducted
by herself and her research assistant Jodi L. Rightler-McDaniels. In her own time,
Wells-Barnett was portrayed by the mainstream press as a “slender, little woman” “of
racial endeavor and accomplishment within the range of femininity.” In truth, however,
Wells-Barnett was an extremely savvy advocacy journalist, who used the press as a
space to promote her Alpha Suffrage Club as both a site of united womanhood and a
site of resistance and empowerment. Nevertheless, Wells-Barnett’s role as a prominent
women’s rights advocate was marginalized and misunderstood during her own time, and
a cultural amnesia surrounds it still.

David B. Sachsman, University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, "The Divided Press"

The American press has been a press divided since its earliest beginnings, divided
over the issue of revolution, divided between John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, and
divided North and South. The newspapers that were divided North and South before the
Civil War played some role in setting the agenda for that war by providing readers
across the nation with a war of words and ideas. During the conflict, newspapers North
and South divided again, as dissenters on both sides criticized their national governments
and questioned the goals of their nations. Partisan political, social, regional, and
philosophical divisions continued into the twentieth century and are still with us
today.

Brian Shott, “Imperialism in the Classroom: An Analysis of 'School Begins’”

Before the age of television and movies, political cartoons printed in newspapers
and “illustrated magazines” were enormously influential. The late-nineteenth and early
twentieth century is considered the golden age of the political cartoon; cartoonists
were credited with shaping public opinion and even ending political careers through
their barbed sketches. Many turn-of-the-century political cartoons depicted American
“expansion” with a globetrotting Uncle Sam or President William McKinley confronting
indigenous peoples from Cuba, Hawaii, or the Philippines. This paper will analyze
an 1899 political cartoon by Louis Dalrymple that appeared in the popular illustrated
magazine Puck, in an attempt to more fully understand the cartoon’s text, images, and symbols. The
cartoon, titled “School Begins,” is a trenchant depiction of imperial ideology, its
racial constructions, and internal contradictions. Scholarship in the fields of history,
American studies, print culture other fields will be drawn upon. “School Begins” is
frequently used in undergraduate U.S. history courses as a demonstration of pro-war
sentiment and racialized notions of civilization. Has the full complexity of the cartoon
been recognized?

Though focused on the turn of the century, the paper fits well with the themes of
the conference, including its emphasis on the Civil War and the press. At the start
of the Philippine-American war, the Civil War was still very much in Americans’ minds.
Anti-imperialists were often depicted as modern-day Copperheads, for example, and
text in the cartoon about the Confederate states refusing their “consent to be governed”
show tensions between liberal notions of self-government and the exigencies, perceived
or real, of statecraft that continue today.

Maryan Soliman, University of Pennsylvania, “Abolishing Wage Slavery in the Gilded Age: The American Labor Movement’s Memory of
the Civil War”

As scholars of Civil War memory studies continue to discuss the meanings Americans
ascribed to the war, it is worth considering how workers as a group remembered the
event. John Swinton’s Paper provides a useful site for exploring the labor movement’s memory of the Civil War.
Although twenty years had passed since the close of the war, most issues of the weekly
labor newspaper referred to the historic struggle. Published between 1883 and 1887,
the New York-based paper existed during the period contemporaries termed “the great
uprising of labor.” As long-time journalist John Swinton reported on the events of
the day—from the crusade for the eight-hour day to workingmen candidates’ bids for
political office—he offered a critique of and alternative to industrial capitalism.
The Civil War figured prominently in this analysis. An examination of the Paper’s Civil War discourse reveals the ways in which a segment of the labor movement remembered
the war and illuminates the politics of an important set of labor reformers. Attention
to how labor reformers remembered the Civil War also contributes to an ongoing debate
among historians about the memory of the war in the late nineteenth century. Some
historians emphasize the process of sectional reconciliation, in which the meaning
of the Civil War in dominant discourse no longer centered on slavery but rather on
the valor of soldiers from both sides. Other historians address the limits of sectional
reconciliation, arguing that veterans and other Americans as a whole did not relinquish
their understandings of the war. John Swinton’s Paper demonstrates that while labor leaders and allied veterans did highlight the issue
of slavery, they imbued it with new meaning related to labor’s circumstances in the
Gilded Age. Referencing the Civil War helped labor reformers represent themselves
as the true champions of the Republic.

This article examines advertisements printed in Kentucky newspapers during the Civil
War that pertain to slavery. The “peculiar institution” was legally practiced in
Kentucky later than anywhere else in the United States. The state’s position as a
loyal border slave state exempted it from President Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation,
and by refusing to end slavery by state mandate, it required the Thirteenth Amendment
to the Constitution to formally end the institution within the Commonwealth. By merely
being printed, advertisements helped reinforce slavery as an accepted, beneficial,
and vital institution to the Bluegrass State. Published announcements that mentioned
various aspects of slavery appeared in the state’s newspapers during the war to help
sell everything from the slaves themselves, to patent medicines, to farms, to clothing,
and even foodstuffs. In addition, hundreds of notices were posted by slaveholders
in attempt to apprehend their runaway laborers; and by jailers, who captured and held
enslaved people attempting to flee their owners. The Civil War created enough disruption
to slavery in Kentucky that statutes were enacted in attempt to stabilize and maintain
the institution despite overwhelming evidence that it was dying. Months after the
fighting ended white Kentuckians continued to print notices that sold and rented their
human property. Others boldly warned neighbors not to employ or harbor their slaves.
Advertisements like these appeared up until December 1865, when the Thirteenth Amendment
was finally ratified by the necessary number of states. A survey of Kentucky’s Civil
War advertisements provides vivid evidence and telling testimony of not only white
Kentuckians’ strident commitment to slavery, but African Americans’ equally passionate
desire for freedom.

Dwight Teeter and Michael Martinez, University of Tennessee, Knoxville, “The Dead Hand of the Past: McBurney v. Young's 2013 Use of 19th Century Precedents to Downplay Foia Statutes”

Limitation of access to government information in the 19th Century United States was the rule, with some exceptions. Access to government records,
then as in the 21st Century, was—illogically—not tied by the courts to First Amendment freedoms “ . .
. of speech, or of the press.” In the 21st Century, the Supreme Court of the United States’ disdain for the people’s right to
know may be seen in its reliance on 19th Century horse-and-buggy era decisions in McBurney v.Young, decided in 2013.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the Court’s 21st Century use of 19th Century court precedents through the lens of the McBurney decision. That decision turned aside a challenge to Virginia’s Freedom of Information
Act (FOIA), ruling that Virginia could deny non-residents the use of the Virginia’s
open records act. That restriction, the U.S. Supreme Court held, did not violate
the U.S. Constitution’s Privileges and Immunities Clause. The Court could have stopped
there, but in the opinion written for a unanimous Court by Justice Samuel A. Alito,
Jr., issued a gratuitous statement using 19th Century (and older) court decisions to minimize the importance of current public’s
right to know legislation.

Tom Terry, Utah State University, and Donald Shaw, University of North Carolina at
Chapel Hill, “A Tremendous and Baleful Aspect: Conscription in the Civil War through the Pages
of Federal and Confederate Newspapers in 1863”

For over a century, the American military depended, to greater and lesser degrees,
on the manpower provided by conscription. Both Confederate and Union leaders in the
Civil War, appalled by the heavy combat losses and desperate to secure victory or
stave off defeat, turned to the draft to fill the ranks of their armies. This study
looked at how contemporary newspapers, both North and South, explained and reacted
to the Union’s Enrollment Act of 1863, technically the second operational draft in
American history; the Confederate Congress had passed a similar bill a year earlier.
The authors conclude that newspaper editors and reporters at the time misjudged both
the promise and the reality of the draft’s importance, though not the controversies
and even riots it engendered. The newspapers do provide a fascinating glimpse into
the role they played in the quarrels that animated public debate. The vivid and vitriolic
language employed by newspapers from both sides also gives a flavor of the anger,
passion, and zeal of the times.

Beverly Tomek, University of Houston-Victoria, “Free Speech and the Destruction of
Pennsylvania Hall: Using a ‘Legal Lynching’ to Awaken the Public”

As immediate abolitionists came under attack across the northern United States throughout
the 1830s, they found creative ways to turn anti-abolition violence into a means of
gaining converts for their cause. In the case of the 1838 mobbing and destruction
of Pennsylvania Hall, abolitionists, led by editor and poet John Greenleaf Whittier,
used the story of the short life and violent destruction of the hall to show otherwise
uninterested northerners that the freedom of slaves was not the only issue. Beginning
the morning after the attack, they reported the incident in newspapers throughout
the North in ways that highlighted the fact that free speech itself had been assaulted
on that fateful night, just blocks away from the Liberty Bell in Philadelphia. Using
press accounts, memoirs, and Whittier’s poetry, this paper will trace abolitionist
efforts to awaken the general public to the efforts of the “Slave Power” to silence
all opposition to the institution of slavery. Through the abolition press, Pennsylvania
Hall was transformed from a simple building into a lynched martyr whose fate illustrated
the fragility of free speech and freedom of expression in a nation that tolerated
human bondage.

Virginia seceded on May 23, 1861. The following morning, Union troops advanced on
Alexandria by sea and by land, capturing the city before mid-morning and rendering
it the longest-occupied city anywhere in the South. Its people suffered through hardships
associated with enemy occupation, including general lawlessness and repression by
Union occupiers. The city’s one remaining newspaper, the Alexandria Gazette, and its owners/editors, Edgar Snowden, Sr., and Edgar Snowden, Jr., suffered along
with their neighbors. Through four years of war, the Snowdens endured suspension of
their newspaper, loss of their plant to a soldier’s arson, arrest, near banishment,
and service as a human shield to protect Union troop trains from raiders by John S.
Mosby and his Confederate raider. Despite their suffering at the hands what they perceived
to be Unionist tyrants, the paper survived the war and, within a decade of its end,
was back on strong footing, thus living out the message emblazoned in its pre-war
seal which showed a victorious soldier standing over a vanquished foe and proclaimed,
in Latin, “Thus, always to the tyrant.”

Michael Vilardo, “The Lunatic is in the Hall: Press Coverage of Asylums and Early Psychiatric Care,
1865-1870”

This paper hones in on the treatment of “lunatics” and conditions of insane asylums
in the mid to late nineteenth century (1865-1870). It also reviews and scrutinizes
early psychiatric care where there were considerably less resources and afforded ability
due to how archaic early treatment truly was. The poor infrastructure as well as the
shoddy talk therapy provided an atrocious environment for the patients. This paper
also delves into state sanctioned inspections of the asylums and presents a wealth
of information concerning how mental illness can strike anyone ranging from police
officers to farmers to just an other wise healthy young man. Some journalists who
covered the topic, such as Limbocker, vied for the the plight of the insane being
heard with attention. There was also the racial dimension of treatment where rooms
fit for only a few “inmates” contained 15 to 20. There was also the underestimation
of lunatics to convene and accomplish something in a democratic fashion. In addition,
research on early medication such as opium (tested on frogs) and camphor will be discussed.
There was also the matter of caretakers and those who were afflicted being grossly
mistreated as a result of the nurse or whomever watched the patient wanting a domineering
relationship with the sick.

Amber Welch, Georgia Statue University, “Babies as Breadwinners: Child Labor Prior
to Federal Reform in the Industrial North and the Industrializing South, 1890 to 1899”

As the Industrial Revolution in America caused an increase in child labor, a growing
tide of social reformers rallied behind the cause to end child labor abuses. By the
1890s, child-labor abuse had become a national problem as post-War industrialization
in the North and South attracted rural migrants seeking employment for themselves
and their children. The press was a major voice for child labor reformers, and in
the 1890s, social reformers increasingly adopted child labor reform as an active platform.
Another side effect of an industrializing America was the mass migration of people
from rural life to urban spaces. By examining child labor reform press coverage for
signs of the mounting anxiety about unfamiliar urban life, this paper will explain
why child labor, which occurred everywhere, became localized to the urban space of factories in the rhetoric of reform. Further,
this analysis exposes a difference in reform efforts and press coverage from a Northern-Southern
perspective, exposing various approaches from which to view the legislative, economic,
moral, educational, and parental components of the child labor reform discourse.

Denitsa Yotova-Green, University of Nevada, Las Vegas, “Late Nineteenth Century Visual
Media as Social Documentary: Jacob Riis’s Five Points Photography, Magic Lantern Spectacle
and the Beginning of Documentary Film”

This paper examines the birth and evolution of the social documentary genre in visual
media and suggests that a mixture of ideology, technology, and social awareness are
necessary for a successful social reform. Its review of related literature determines
that despite the limitations of technology during the nineteenth century, documentaries
were produced long before they were part of the genres of photography and film. By
focusing on the work of Danish photographer Jacob Riis and tracing the emergence of
the film medium through time, this paper demonstrates a strong connection between
documentary film and Riis’s social documentary photography and public slide exhibitions.
The study demonstrates that Riis’s work should be viewed as one of the chief precursors
of the social documentary genre in visual media.